The Pale - History

History

The Norman invasion of Ireland beginning in 1169 brought much of Ireland briefly under the theoretical control of the Plantagenet Kings of England. From the 13th century onwards, the Hiberno-Norman occupation in the rest of Ireland at first faltered then waned. Across most of Ireland the Normans increasingly assimilated into Irish culture after 1300. A series of alliances with their neighbouring autonomous Gaelic princes developed. In the long periods when there was no large royal army in Ireland, the Norman lords in the provinces acted as effectively independent rulers in their own areas, as the Gaels continued to do.

The remaining Lordship that was actually controlled by the English king shrank accordingly, and as parts of its perimeter in counties Meath and Kildare were fenced or ditched, it became known as the Pale, deriving from the Latin word "palus", a stake, or, synecdochically, a fence. Parts can still be seen west of Clane on the grounds of what is now Clongowes Wood College. The military power of the crown itself was greatly weakened by the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), and the Wars of the Roses (1455–85). The Irish parliament was created, which often sat at Drogheda, until the Tudors took greater interest in Irish affairs from 1485 and moved it back to Dublin. The Pale generally consisted of fertile lowlands, which were easier for the garrison to defend from ambush than hilly or wooded ground. For reasons of trade and administration, a version of English became the official and common language. Its closest modern derivative is said to be the accent used by natives of Fingal.

In 1366, in order for the English Crown to assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled in Kilkenny and the Statute of Kilkenny was enacted. The statute decreed that inter-marriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It also forbade the settlers using the Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs; such practices were already common. In particular the adoption of Gaelic Brehon property laws undermined the feudal nature of the Lordship. The Act could never be implemented successfully, even in the Pale itself, and was a sign of how Ireland was withdrawing from English cultural norms. By the Tudor period, the Irish culture and language had regained most of the territory initially lost to the colonists: even in the Pale, ‘all the common folk … for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit and of Irish language’. And in fact there was fairly extensive intermarriage between the Gaelic Irish aristocracy and Anglo-Norman lords beginning not long after the invasion and continuing right through into modern times. See Irish nobility for some surviving examples.

By the late 15th century the Pale became the only part of Ireland that remained subject to the English king, with most of the island paying only token recognition of the overlordship of the English crown. The tax base shrank to a fraction of what it had been in 1300. The earls of Kildare ruled as Lords Deputy from 1470 (with more or less success) by a series of alliances with the Gaels. This lasted until the 1520s, when the earls passed out of royal favour, but the 9th earl was reinstated in the 1530s. The brief revolt by his son "Silken Thomas" in 1534–35 led on to the Tudor conquest of Ireland in the following decades, in which Dublin and the surviving Pale was used as the main military base for expansion.